Page 7 of Orc’s Hex

She looks at him like he’s a problem she intends to solve. He’s been looked at with pity. With fear. With the careful performed blankness of people who know his reputation and are working very hard not to show it. Not one of them looked at him the way Ziva Stark looks at him. Like interest is the right response.

“I need to read the sigil on your chest,” she says.

He goes still.

“The ancestral marking. I caught a glimpse through your collar yesterday. I need the full inscription.”

He’s had the sigil examined before. By practitioners who confirmed their own incompetence by doing nothing useful with what they found. He opens his shirt collar three buttons and turns toward the small grate fire in the war chamber’s east wall.

She rounds the table.

She moves fast. Not rushed—fast, the way someone moves when they’ve decided what they’re doing and their body has caught up. She stops in arm’s reach and tilts her head to read the carving at his collar.

He’s a foot taller than her. She compensates by angling up, which pulls the line of her jaw taut and exposes the column of her throat above her collar, and he does not look at this the way he does not look at it. The heat off the grate fire. Her breath, steadied and completely unconcerned with how close she’s standing to him.

She smells like cold stone and old blood from whatever work she did in the Hall of Oaths last night. His body registers this before he does and it is deeply inconvenient.

She reaches up. Palm flat over the sigil.

And the world goes wrong.

Heat detonates under his skin—not surface heat, deep, radiating out from his chest faster than he can track it. His vision fractures. Clean. Immediate.

He sees her hand. Her face, focused, eyes gone nearly dark with concentration. Her attention directed entirely at the inscription.

And simultaneously the curse’s version of her.

Traitor. It doesn’t arrive as a word. It arrives as absolute certainty, the way Blood Law delivers everything—encoded deep, below the level of thought, a knowing that bypasses argument. Her touch not examination. Preparation. Her focus not professional. Predatory. The witch’s hand on his skin the beginning of something the curse has already decided will end with his bloodline extinguished.

His hand lifts.

He stops it.

Not real. I know what her hand is. I know what her face is. I know the difference between what I’m looking at and what the curse is showing me and I have been holding that difference for a hundred and sixty-five years.

He holds it.

The hallucination is louder than anything else in the room. He holds it anyway.

She removes her hand.

The fracture recedes—always takes longer than it should, the curse stubborn even in retreat. He stands in the aftermath, hand at his side, occupied with the full-body effort of not having moved.

She’s looking at him. Not at the sigil anymore. At him.

He buttons his collar.

“That wasn’t a surface reaction.”

“No.”

She tilts her head a fraction. “What did you see, when I touched it.”

Most people who’ve witnessed a surge ask what he did, or whether they’re safe. She asked what he saw. He stands with that for a moment.

“The curse has a version of you,” he says. “It shows me that version when you’re close. The version is—“ He selects the word. “Unconvincing. But loud.”

She looks at him without the softness he’s learned to brace for—just attention. The kind that does something with what it finds.